The best of the week in Cybersecurity

The generation born after 1980, called Millenials, makes up one-third of the world's total population, which also means a third of the world's workforce. It is a generation that uses social networks at every moment and practically their whole life is online. The spontaneity with which they manage themselves on the internet makes them not fear cyber attacks so they do not put every possible means at their disposal to protect themselves. This fact can affect the companies in which they work, as many of them use of social networks and personal email in their workplace and can get to infect their work equipments.

Many of these 'Millenials' might lose control of their Twitter accounts, as it happened last Thursday to the European Parliament, US Unicef​​, or BBC North America. The Twitter accounts of these international organizations were attacked by what seemed like a large-scale cyber attack. Many of the hacked messages were in Turkish and displayed a swastika and the hashtags #Nazialmanya and #Nazihollanda. This attack can be related to the diplomatic conflict between Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands, after Dutch and German officials forbade Turkish ministers to campaign in some parts of their countries. Luckily the problem was solved in just a few hours.

Today also has been in the news an identity theft of a Twitter account… does the biggest chain of fast food have a problem with the president of the United States? That is what it seemed like from the messages that McDonald's wrote from its official twitter to Trump. The tweet was quickly deleted and the brand said the account had been "harmed". Although it has not yet been cleared whether it was hacked or, for example, taken by an employee who does not very much agree with the president's policy.

Millenials use the mobile as a further extension of their body and hopefully none of their Androids were inside this ‘batch’ of mobiles that were infected even without having left their packaging.
The 38 phones had pre-installed malware somewhere along the supply chain between the provider and the client. Check Point Software Technologies said they were infected with adware, malware and information theft, a collection of malicious code as diverse as the number of the different manufacturers. Among these manufacturers is Samsung, LG, Asus or Lenovo.

Look what a cute kitten they have sent to the group! I'm going to enlarge it… ERROR! A WhatsApp Web bug that was exploitable simply by clicking on an image. After Check Point investigators warned of the vulnerability to WhatsApp, it was fixed in 24 hours. The attacks were able to undo end-to-end encryption by protecting message content across millions of accounts, which also affected the messaging application Telegram. Fortunately for users, problems were fixed on both WhatsApp and Telegram servers, which means that only a restart of the browser should solve the problem.

Although we anticipated that the generation born after 1980 felt like a fish in the water in the cyber world, it seems they are not that comfortable with cybersecurity and even less if we talk about women. According to the 2017 Women in Cybersecurity Report, only 11% of the world's cybersecurity professionals are women. The report is based on survey responses from more than 19,000 security professionals across 170 countries.As it happens in other professions, the difference in wages and feeling undervalued and discriminated in the sector makes many of them not even try to enter the world of cybersecurity. That is a news item that caught our attention and hopefully it will change soon so that those jobs that remain vacant are occupied and there is equity in all sectors.